Despite similar - and pretty big – size, these two system cases designed in Big Tower form-factor offer us two completely different approaches to organization of their internal space and structure. Read our review for more details.

If you’ve got a card-reader, you can easily remove the faceplate from the guide.

The power supply is installed on a U-shaped base and is fastened to the back panel. By the way, you can replace the bottom part of the back panel for a part that is compatible with server PSUs with hot swap feature. The version for standard PSUs is not perfect, though. It provides a seat for two 80mm fans above the PSU (they should improve the cooling of the HDD cages) but you cannot turn the PSU upside down. As a result, a PSU with a 120mm or 140mm fan will have to take the air from the narrow space under the U-shaped base.

There is a second preinstalled 120mm fan in front of the HDD cages. It is fastened on a special aluminum frame. Above it you can see a fan controller with connectors for four devices. This controller feeds data to the front-panel display and interacts with the two speed adjustment buttons. The four attached fans are adjusted all together. It is good that the manufacturer has provided a couple of extension cords. If you install fans on the top panel, their cables will hardly reach to that corner through the entire interior.

Talking about the front-panel fan, you can unfasten the thumbscrews and remove the fan to see a fine dust filter.

This system case offers two cages, each for four HDDs (and you can buy cages for the 5-inch bays, too). The cages are not very rigid, though. They are fastened at the bottom panel while the top panel is not fixed at all.

It is easy to install a cage: just move it along the guides so that the heads of the protruding screws fitted into the appropriate grooves. After that you only have to fix the cage with a spring-loaded thumbscrew.

HDDs are installed into the cages using rubber vibration-absorbing pads.

The HDD with those pads attached goes into the cage until a stop. After that, the front pair of the pads is lowered into the special cutout. The fastening is secure and vibration-free. It would be perfect if the cages were more rigid.

If the case is going to be transported somewhere, the installed HDDs should additionally be fastened with screws in the center of the side panels.

The main problem we encountered when we were assembling our test configuration in this case was the above-mentioned procedure for installing an optical drive. Besides, you should have long SATA cables. The standard 50cm ones may not be long enough to stretch diagonally through the entire case (don’t forget the separating partition) from the bottom HDDs to the mainboard’s connectors. And one more thing: you should take the wires from the top-panel connectors out beforehand, prior to installing the optical drive, unless you want to check out your fingers for flexibility.

The cables have to be laid out inside the case as usual, but they don’t take much of its interior space. The bunch of cables over the HDDs is a nuisance, but not a big one.